PEKIN — It was introduced to the nation by a youthful, modern, game-changing president, championed after his assassination by his successor, the ultimate legislative insider.

Its need was attested to at every segregated hotel or lunch counter; every job denied or school still separate and unequal; every protester who faced down a firehose or police dog; every church bombed or cross burned; every life lost.

But it wasn’t until a conservative senator who once held Abraham Lincoln’s seat in Congress got his hands on it that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 could be assured passage into law or history.

The measure outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, religion, gender and national origin, required integration of public facilities and sought to improve access to voting and integrated schools.

“Circumstances in early 1964 through June conspired to put Dirksen at center stage, and it’s no exaggeration to say that without Dirksen’s support, there would have been no Civil Rights Act of 1964,” said Frank Mackaman, director of the Dirksen Congressional Center in the senator’s hometown, Pekin.

Serious words, deeds

“The time has come for equality of opportunity in sharing in government, in education and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here,” U.S. Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen told his colleagues. “America grows. America changes. And on the civil rights issue we must rise with the occasion.”

When Dirksen spoke, people listened. Indeed, four years after the passage of this legislation, he would win a Grammy for best spoken-word album — the first, although not the last, politician to do so.

Those remarks before a June 12, 1964, vote that, for the first time in American history, cut off the filibuster of a civil rights bill — after 57 days — and allowed for passage of the final legislation, weren’t the only thing people listened to.

It was a long, hard effort, one that required serious legislative heft and an interest in creating policy more than scoring political points.

“Dirksen believed in the promise of bipartisanship to produce good public policy in the national interest,” Mackaman said.

It was part of a pattern Dirksen had established long before of inserting himself into key legislative battles to ensure their success.

“He had built this record of being able to provide the last critical votes, particularly for treaties or for cloture,” or votes to stop filibusters, said Colorado College political science professor Robert Loevy, who has written three books on the legislation.

Page 2 of 4 - Loevy worked for Dirksen’s top deputy during a Capitol Hill fellowship in 1964 and was present for some of the discussions and negotiations that led to the final product.

“He simply had definite ideas on how good legislation should work,” Loevy said.

That included more than 70 amendments to tweak the legislation and to make it more acceptable for wavering colleagues.

“Dirksen always contended that Democrats always tended to write bills that sounded great and to make great speeches, but they hadn’t really done the work of writing legislation that would function as a law,” Loevy said. “His aides were very clear on this. They liked to use the phrase ‘enforceable legislation’ — that’s legislation that was clear and would work.”

Even though a bill had been moved through the House, where matters were easier — no filibuster rules existed for Southern segregationists to bottle up measures as they had 11 times before; lawmakers friendlier to civil rights controlled key committees — the Senate was going to be the challenge.

Dirksen’s legislative skill helps to show why White House leaders from another party looped him in immediately on the legislation. In fact, in 1963 when it was first being talked about, Vice President Lyndon Johnson insisted.

Taking pride in the sausage-making process of lawmaking wasn’t the totality of what inspired the Senate leader, though.

Mackaman can count more than 140 pieces of civil rights legislation that Dirksen pushed in a career that spanned from the early 1930s to 1969.

“As early as 1939, he succeeds in amending a bill that provided for federal funds for training airline pilots, and he wanted to make sure the money was available to African-Americans,” he said.

Such small-scale works stand alongside anti-poll-tax bills — fighting a common way of preventing poorer blacks from voting — and anti-mob-violence bills.

“I think he came at it from a moral perspective,” Mackaman said. “I think his reading of the Bible imbued in him a sense of an idea whose time has come, which is the moral component.”

There’s perhaps a more practical component, too. Dirksen’s House records were thrown out when he took a two-year hiatus from that chamber midway through his political career, but some of his experience there may have helped inform his pursuit of greater equality.

“I have a hunch that his service on the District of Columbia Committee in the House put him in daily contact with the issues faced by African-Americans residing in the District. That gave him the face-to-face contact with those issues that he (might) have lacked in central Illinois.”

Page 3 of 4 - It wasn’t political pressure that led to the support. Dirksen was openly dismissive of the influence of large rallies or interest-group advocacy on the legislative process, and Mackaman notes his share of the vote in predominantly African-American parts of the state was always low.

There may still have been a political calculus, though.

“We really thought this was going to produce a wave of African-American support for the Republican Party,” Loevy said. “The big surprise, of course, was that Barry Goldwater got the Republican nomination in 1964” after voting against ending the filibuster and against the bill.

“So the goodwill for the Republicans that Dirksen hoped he was building was just dashed completely.”

Lots of credit

Nevertheless, Dirksen’s role in shepherding the legislation through the Senate was recognized afterward. Soon thereafter, he graced the cover of Time magazine — a signal honor from the dominant news weekly — and drew notice from press nationwide.

It also drew compliments from his opposite number among Senate Democrats, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana.

“Dear Ev: We have come through a most trying period in the Senate,” he wrote. “In retrospect, the issues were such that they might have opened schisms which would have been years in closing. That did not happen, and I want you to know how grateful I am for the help, the understanding and the cooperation which you gave me in striving to prevent it.”

Today, that may strike many Americans as strange.

“I cannot imagine Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell even thinking about doing something like that,” Mackaman said of the current Senate majority and minority leaders.

But — try this on for size, modern-day Washington — Dirksen replied to share the credit with the very man whose party outnumbered him 2-to-1 and could have ignored the contribution completely.

“These were private exchanges, so they never imagined these letters to be public, so I imagine they were sincere,” Mackaman said.

Nor was Mansfield alone.

Hubert Humphrey, who led a party-shattering battle 16 years before among Democrats over a pro-civil-rights party platform and would soon be tapped for the vice presidency, crossed the aisle to thank Dirksen.

“This was truly an example of legislating in the finest sense of the word,” he wrote. “You have made a contribution toward the solution of the racial crisis in this country which will not soon be forgotten.”

Not long remembered

There’s a bevy of new scholarship on the topic and three books coming out this year on the measure for the 50th anniversary, but Dirksen’s role has sometimes been forgotten, even miles from where his family lived.

Some, though, are using the anniversary to expose a new generation to the influence a hometown statesman had. Bradley University will host an anniversary celebration Friday paying tribute to Dirksen’s role, with U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia — he marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — giving a keynote address.

King’s words to Dirksen shortly after the bill’s passage distill down the essence of why remembering what Dirksen did is important.

“Without your able and courageous leadership of the Republican forces in the Senate, the strong, bipartisan Civil Rights Act of 1964 would not have been possible,” he wrote June 24, 1964. “You have earned the sincere gratitude of freedom loving people the world over.”